Top iPad Music Apps (a/o June 19th):
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It's another frustrating tease of the modern-day music industry. The music video utterly dwarfs the audio stream when it comes to volume, yet you rarely meet anyone making real money off of this format. Or, for that matter, cutting through the considerable audio-visual noise floor.
A look at the numbers is predictably depressing. Rebecca Black earned herself a college tuition, but that's the extreme. At Digital Music Forum West in Los Angeles last week, there were execs claiming to be making significant money on their YouTube artist channels. But there weren't any hard figures, and sad stories like those surrounding the Dead Kennedys were hardly mentioned. Elsewhere, VEVO is making several hundred million in revenue off of Beyonce and Bieber clips. This is a tiny club of winners.
So the question is this...
Actually, there is a company in San Francisco trying to crack this riddle, and we've had the pleasure of working with them in an advisory capacity. It's BAMM.tv, a startup situated in a forgotten patch of San Francisco, just outside the swankier SoMA startup neighborhood. This is a studio first and office second, and BAMM has created an entire factory for creating, distributing, and (hopefully) monetizing the indie music video on a global scale. And, they're curating their own catalog, picking bands they want to work with, and smartly bypassing major label licensing.
This is a complex model, and a risky one at that. But the premise is that the well-curated, HD-quality indie video is being woefully underestimated and underappreciated, and can be effectively distributed and monetized across scores of screens worldwide. That includes mobile decks, IPTV installations, and even Asian hotel rooms, with an appetite for American and indie culture still a driving factor.
One of those screens is the iPad, and this week at SF MusicTech, the company unveiled a sort of app playground for the hundreds of the underground bands they've been filming. It's slick and designed for exploration, with HD-quality content housed within the low-tech motif of a dive club and dusty analog equipment. That's all complemented by artist bios, upcoming gigs, and app-y bells-and-whistles like gamified rewards for engagement.
Those elements may ultimately be distracting gizmos for indie music fans, and the real prize is the content itself. But the bigger problem for BAMM will be the insanely overcrowded App Store itself, and its tendency to swallow almost everything overnight. That said, this is part of a bigger BAMM.tv strategy of creating lots of distribution tentacles, including app and website environments. It's a concept that loosely resembles VEVO's idea of pushing video streams into a wide variety of 'faucets,' and it's an experiment that's just getting started.
BAMM.tv is having an open house tonight (Thursday) at their digs on 43 Norfolk in San Francisco. It's all part of SF MusicTech Week; RSVP here.
Tony Hymes Thursday, October 11, 2012
BAMM.tv is awesome! such a good idea!
Caroline from Radar Friday, October 12, 2012
Interesting. I think the main issue is whether the content will prove appealing - after all it's unknown bands and they are all performance videos, which on the whole are less interesting than promo videos.
But I love its ambition.
Caroline from Radar Friday, October 12, 2012
Also, if I understand it correctly, it's not really an indie like-for-like with Vevo, which monetises any music video content supplied by the artist (who don't have to be signed to majors), rather than only screening content shot by BAMMTV.
Very interesting and detailed article though. Thanks.
nypbbob Monday, October 22, 2012
Funn Networks has pledged to pay the same to Indies that they will be paying majors.. For example, music videos will be paid 20 times more than You Tune pays. Streaming music will be paid 20 to 30 times more than Pandora pays.. Take a look at the Tweets they post. It spells it out.
We signed up for Funn's beta. Cant wait!
PS- we're surprised DMN hasn't interviewed them yet
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